Accept the Mystery

"Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." - Rashi.

I recently rewatched the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man for the first time since its Blu-Ray/DVD release back in February, and enjoyed it much more this time out. The Coens have always been merchants of misanthropy, but it was just so intense and over-the-top in this film that I could barely stand to watch it.

Re-appraising it over the weekend, however, I managed to tune out the bulk of the film - consisting mostly of scene after scene after scene of harassment and humiliation heaped on lead character Larry Gopnik - and focus on the subtle goodies sprinkled lightly throughout. The periphery is always where the most interesting stuff happens in Coen films anyway, but you really have to mine for it a little harder in A Serious Man.

The film opens with a seemingly non-sequitur bit about a Jewish couple (Velvel and Dora) about a hundred years ago. They are visited in the middle of a dark and snowy night by a man claiming to be Reb Groshkover. Dora, aghast, insists the man must be a Dybbuk because she knows the real Groshkover is dead.

(In Jewish tradition, a Dybbuk is a possessing spirit that floats around seeking bodies to attach itself to and inhabit, like a virus and its host. The word itself literally means "attachment".)

Dora stabs him in the sternum with an icepick, and it appears at first that her superstitious theory is true: Groshkover has virtually no reaction to the stabbing, and in fact laughs heartily at her. Just before he gets up to leave (saying "one knows when one is not wanted"), however, we see a pool of blood forming around the icepick that is still protruding from his chest. Groshkover disappears into the night, and the couple still disagree on whether this was a Dybbuk or not. Since the scene ends there, we will never know - was he or wasn't he?

This places Dora and Velvel's mysterious visitor in the same unknowable Eigenstate as Schrödinger's Cat, the example commonly used to illustrate the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.

Gopnik, later in the film, actually gives his students a lesson on Schrödinger's Cat, and points out to them the futility of trying to truly know anything - even as he expects them to study the subject and subsequently take a test on it. Gopnik clearly seems incapable of applying the lesson of Schrödinger's Cat to his own life - two different people in the course of the film urge him to just "accept the mystery", and he just doesn't get it.


Gopnik's brother Arthur, meanwhile, is an idiot savant who lives with him and spends all his time working on a mysterious document he calls The Mentaculus. Arthur believes that the Mentaculus, when completed, will be the end-all, be-all, unified field theory of everything in the Universe. Gopnik largely ignores him, and wishes he'd just get his own apartment and go away. But we see hints that Arthur is actually on to something: Arthur applies his theories to gambling, and in so doing becomes quite successful at it. Seemingly he really can predict the future with his Mentaculus and its "probability map", but he's too socially inept and withdrawn to harness this knowledge properly.

At one point, Gopnik interestingly uses the phrase "bolt from the blue" to describe the upheavals in his life, and says "everything I thought was one way turn out to be another." And at another point, a Rabbi uses the phrase "right where you are sitting now" in the course of telling a convoluted story with no apparent point, about a dentist who thinks he sees the words "help me" (עִזרוּ לִ) in Hebrew on the teeth of a patient.


At film's end (sorry about the spoiler, but the movie has been out for well over a year now) we're left with another unresolved Schrödinger's Cat. Gopnik gets a call from his doctor that he needs to come in immediately for a serious discussion about his X-ray results. The doctor then repeats and underscores the seriousness of it by stressing that Gopnik must come in to see him right now.

Meanwhile, across town, we see Gopnik's son staring at a tornado headed directly for him as his teacher is unable to get the storm shelter door open.

Fade to black. Credits.

Headquarters

I always knew I was the center of the Universe, and now Robert Lanza agrees.

Lanza's book Biocentrism, which contends that human consciousness is what is really determining the shaping of reality - is making waves in the media lately. Even Huffington Post is all over the concept now, giving Lanza ample space to drop some science:

Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. It's presented as a watch that somehow wound itself up, and that will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But they've shunted a critical component of the cosmos out of the way because they don't know what to do with it. This component, consciousness, isn't a small item. It's an utter mystery, which we think has somehow arisen from molecules and goo.

Lanza goes on to enumerate in great detail how extremely unlikely it is that the Universe could have formed in such a way that made conditions just right for this spiral arm of the Milky Way to have formed this planet whose conditions are just right for hosting human life and that we happen to have "evolved" here at just the right time to take advantage of it, despite a long chain of factors and variables that make all of the above statistically near-impossible to have occurred in sequence.

Does it mean that the "Creationists" are right after all? Or does it mean mankind is just the luckiest critter in the Universe?

Lanza says no to both - Lanza says that we dodged all those dangers of the physical world because we were here first and we are shaping reality as we go along - "we" being life itself, the life force, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that is really piloting these golems of flesh and bone we're lumbering around in, that St. Francis of Assisi referred to as "Brother Ass". Though human consciousness may or may not carry greater weight in that reality-creation, life means life, and that includes not only you and me, but all life, even yeast, fungi, and microscopic dust mites.


Lanza isn't the first to propose these ideas, of course - not by any means - and some previous blazers of these trails have expressed them more elegantly, in fact. But by building on the works of those pioneering thinkers who came before him, Lanza is having some success at entering these radical ideas into the mainstream at a time when even our grandparents are finally just starting to have an inkling of the ramifications of quantum physics.

His view of Biocentric Cosmology can be broken down into seven basic principles:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

My old pal David Thompson at NASA's Astroparticle Physics Lab in Maryland has effusively embraced Lanza's work, describing it as "a wake-up call" for us all.

Dresden Angels

The folks at Dresden Star offer some amazing Victorian-style one-of-a-kind Christmas ornaments handmade almost entirely from reclaimed bric-a-brac of the period.

The hot-air-balloon bunny above is made from "old glass ornament(s) with beautiful patina; detailed embossed scrap(s) (most of them predate the 1900s and are meticulously backed with early papers and/or old tinsel); a variety of old fabric - chenille, lace, ribbon and metallic trims; old decorative tinsel (most of which is from old tree garlands); and old papers of all kinds, including lovely old-stock Dresden paper trims, old foil, gift wrap, and other embellishments."

The angel below is made of "antique scrap bust of demure young Victorian maiden, early vintage Dresden paper harp, vintage rhinestone (jewel on necklace), circa 1920s Dennison crepe paper (covered over cardboard that has a built-in cone for hanging as a topper), the finest hand-tatted antique Victorian lace, buff-colored antique lace edged with chenille, early vintage silk flower petals, Dresden paper wings, 3 early vintage and antique Dresden paper medallions, circa 1920s old-stock multi-colored spun-glass halo, antique Dresden paper bows, 3 different antique Dresden paper trims, antique tinsel roping, delicate antique gold cording (hanger)."

The End of Time

Meatloaf may not have to pray for the end of time for as long as he thought.

Scientists are now saying that time itself may cease to exist in just a mere five billion years. They say this will occur "coincidentally, right around the time our sun is slated to die," but consider that this isn't a coincidence at all, but rather an indicator of our own live demonstration of quantum uncertainty and humans creating their own reality, unwittingly, via our own perceptions - as far as we're concerned, in a very real sense, we really are the center of the Universe.

The time-will-end theory depends on acceptance of the idea of the Multiverse (and that's an idea we fully endorse here, in case you haven't caught on), and in discussing this, the above-linked National Geographic article actually elucidates one of the most radical, dangerous, and paradigm-shattering truths there is:

"The problem with a multiverse is that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, and that makes calculating probabilities seemingly impossible."

If the above sentence doesn't simultaneously terrify you, inspire you, make you burst into tears, make you start laughing like a maniac, make you want to quit your job, make you want to go lay down and try not to think about it, then you haven't truly wrapped your head around the implications of what it really means.

A related phenomenon that we're just starting to understand is the unknown structures tugging at our own universe that would have been total sci-fi fodder not long ago, but it's quickly become accepted as business as usual. There's a so-called "dark flow" towards the edge of the Universe that's causing hundreds of galaxy clusters to zoom, en masse, in the same direction at over 2.2 million miles an hour, and according to leading physicists, it is the best indicator we have of objects outside our universe and outside what we call "reality" influencing objects in our own.

When you start really grasping these concepts with the same part of your brain that you think about your day-to-day life stuff - and not just quickly filing it away in the "gosh, how bout that, aint that somethin" part of your brain - you might start caring a lot less about the little things on this rock that so many people waste their entire brief existences obsessing about (sports, politics, scrapbooking).

(Image above: the currently most distant known object in the Universe, a little something we like to call "UDFy-38135539".)

Victorian Ladies Spy Camera Concealed in Watch

"Secret gadgets up under her clothes,
Stuff you hear about but nobody knows,
It ain't no use - all women are bad."

- Lux Interior, 1989.


Spotted on Watchismo:

“The Lancaster Watch Camera was patented in October 1886 and made until 1890. Such tiny cameras were the forerunners for the ‘spy’ camera – a mechanism disguised as a different object. However, it would have been very inconvenient to use as four very small catches had to be released in order to remove the glass screen and to fit a separate metal sensitised material holder for each exposure. As a result, the model sadly sold badly and is much rarer than the improved version which came on the market in 1890. The ladies’ pattern is therefore particularly special, and only four original models are known to exist."

Indiana Jones Does Thimble Theatre

Chuck Forsman is a minor deity and here's why. Someone hire this man and put him to work rendering all modern films into E.C. Segar's style, immediately. I want to see him do Inglourious Basterds.


Buy a print of the full sheet of strips here.

The Sitchin Situation

The news hit me yesterday like an atom bomb: Zecharia Sitchin is Dead. Everyone, including myself, was shocked, but the guy was ninety years old. Sitchin seemed timeless, ageless, exempt from death, more of a force or a fixture than a mere mortal. As it turns out, he passed away earlier this month but few knew about it until it was finally announced on the official Sitchin site:

The family asks that you respect its privacy during this difficult time and refrain from contacting family members directly. Instead, to offer tributes to Mr. Sitchin or to contact those handling his affairs, please email tributes@sitchin.com or send a letter to P.O. Box 577, New York, NY 10185.

Far from simply succumbing to senescence, "old age", or so-called "natural causes", Sitchin was still extremely active at 90 and published a new book just a few months ago. It was apparently lingering complications from an "acute abdominal problem" in July that did his physical shell in.

It's rather difficult for me to enunciate a general summary of Sitchin's work, since its tentacles extend to virtually all aspects of life, and since I disagree vehemently with portions of it even as I champion other portions. And those conflicting portions are so intermixed, that even discussing and debating it can be, as Russell Long once said of the JFK assassination mess, "like pickin' gnat shit out of pepper."

Unlike many armchair researchers (like, say, Erich Von Daniken), Sitchin actually travelled extensively and was out there in the field, mixing the map and the message. On one of his "Earth Chronicles Expeditions", he actually visited Phaestos, the city where the Phaestos Disc was unearthed, and made some fascinating discoveries of his own. No, far from being the charlatan that internet negativists sometimes accused him of being, Sitchin was the real deal, and did more hands-on archaeology than some archaeologists I know.


On the other hand, Sitchin did promote a convoluted mythology involving the Anunnaki, a race of extra-terrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. According to Sitchin, the planet Nibiru (or "Planet X") has a severely elliptical orbit in our own Solar System, and makes return visits to us with a long periodicity. Sitchin insisted that the ancient Sumerian culture - which in turn could be said to be the cradle of all subsequent civilization - was created by the Anunnaki, who were also supposedly the same entities as the Biblical Nephilim and the Islamic Jinn.

Wikipedia says: "Sitchin's speculations have been ridiculed by professional scientists, historians, and archaeologists, who note many problems with his translations of ancient texts and categorize his work as pseudohistory and pseudoscience." And that's true enough, but you know and I know that some of the greatest achievements of our lifetime have been labeled "pseudoscience" by the ignoble intelligentsia. The halls of the non-existent museum of pseudoscience are littered with inventions and ideas that really worked, independently of the skeptics who seek to supress puzzle pieces that don't fit their idea of what the big jigsaw puzzle is supposed to be depicting.

Me, I applaud Sitchin's research on its own merits and for its own sake; the puzzling evidence is patently obvious, but Sitchin and I simply differed on how to interpret that evidence. This in no way invalidates the subject itself - I simply prefer to leave most of the blanks unfilled-in and unknown for now, while Sitchin tended to abhor a vacuum every bit as much as the rationalist-skeptics who attacked him, and would fill in the blanks of any unknowns he encountered with a theory to explain them away. Sitchin was rarely heard to say "I just don't know" or "I have no idea what this might mean."

Of course, the Sumerians aren't here to contradict us. They didn't even call themselves Sumerians - they called themselves ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga ("ung sang giga"), which roughly translates as "men with black heads". The terms "Sumer" and "Sumerian" didn't come about, to be retroactively applied, until thousands of years later!


For better or for worse, Sitchin's work has influenced or inspired a whole raft of other para-cosmologies, from The Raelians to The Nuwaubians to David Icke to Nancy Lieder and the Zetas. To his credit, Sitchin took great pains to distance himself from the most rabid of the internet's doom-hungry legions who constantly claim that Nibiru will destroy Earth either in 2012 or any day now. As is so often the case, the problem is not with the originator of an idea or a philosophy, but with demented individuals who appropriate that material and misuse it. The best thing you can do is not to read about Sitchin (this blog post included), but go read what Sitchin himself wrote.


Sitchin's most important work ever was in progress at the time of his passing. In his new book, he proposes that the ancient Sumerian Puabi was an alien goddess whose 4500-year-old skeletal remains may still contain DNA from her alien race. And he was in the process of mounting the "Goddess of Ur Genome Project", an effort to test that DNA and prove that aliens seeded humanity. Perhaps his death will spur his devotees to spearhead this testing through - and posthumously prove him right.

"And of His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the living creatures that He has spread out in them. He has the power to bring them together when He so wills." (Ash-Shura 42:29)

1928 Time Traveller?

There's been a lot of hubbub about this alleged "time traveller" film clip going around the interwebs for a few days now, and it seems to be gathering steam. I hadn't planned on covering it here, but I suppose I should, given the circumstances.

Basically, there's this film footage shot at the 1928 premiere event for Charlie Chaplin's movie The Circus, which seems to show a woman walking around talking on a cellphone. Of course, within conventional thought, that's not possible.


Some have suggested that perhaps it's merely a walkie-talkie, but the earliest walkie-talkies were in the 1940s, and so huge that they were contained in a backpack. It wasn't until the 1950s that handheld walkie-talkies were developed, and even then they were as big as a loaf of bread. These devices were strictly for military use anyway, and public use of walkie-talkies didn't occur until even later.

Maybe she's just listening to a Dodgers game on a small radio and holding it against her ear to hear it clearly? No. Handheld radios didn't happen until the transistor radio boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

For a few moments I thought I'd solved the mystery when I started looking at hearing aids of the time, but then realized that all "ear trumpets" are meant to be held longways with the end against your ear, not the side. If our mystery lady is indeed employing one of those, she's doin' it wrong. And she's apparently talking to it.


So what are we seeing here? Though by no means do I wish to invalidate the idea that this could be a time-traveller or one of the Men in Black, it should be noted that a mobile communication device that transmits through space and time is quite a stretch, and would require some sort of quantum psycho-cybernetic nano-implant, which would then render the need for such a large clunky physical device unnecessary.

Consider that there were crazy people wandering the streets back then, just as there are today. Consider that it is not impossible that some nut is walking around talking to herself while holding a loofah up to her ear or something.

And there have also been suggestions from some quarters that this may actually be a man. I'm indecisive on that point, but if it is a crossdresser, he's not a very good one. Though the shoes and skirt are definitely female, the cloak and hat are mannish, and almost suggest Jack the Ripper.

But let's leave that door shut just now.

Jupiter Over Jefferson County

The planet Jupiter has recently been closer to the Earth than at any time since 1951 or 1963, depending on conflicting media sources.

How close is it?

It's so close that last night, standing in E.P. Sawyer Park in Anchorage, KY, I actually managed to see (I think) one of its 63 known moons through high-powered binoculars.

It's so close that I even managed to take photos with my ordinary and mundane digital camera (an Olympus SP-350, 8.0 megapixel) that, while, not likely to appear in Sky & Telescope anytime soon, are good enough to show Jupiter's characteristic pinkness.

Sea of Shibboleths

A Shibboleth is an ancient concept extending back to Biblical times, from the Hebrew word שִׁבֹּלֶת meaning "grain-bearing plant" (such as wheat or corn). Members of the tribe of Gilead found that enemy members of the tribe of Ephraim invariably mispronounced this word, and so used it as a code word to detect spies.

Today, shibboleths occur in everyday talk and in political speeches via Cant Language, using words and phrases that help to subtly and silently distinguish members of any given group from non-members. Politicians such as George W. Bush II have peppered their language with keywords and phrases that act as a signal to certain extreme right-wing Christian organizations, who say "hey, this guy's one of us!" when they hear them. The phrases are usually innocuous enough that they pass unnoticed, even through the major media scrutiny that a politician's speech receives.

One of my favorite films, Inglourious Basterds, is all about the nuances of language and codes and customs and shibboleths - even its very name is a shibboleth. Tarantino, a devout film buff, liberally loaded his movie with film history references, some obvious, some abstract. And throughout the film, we see the characters scrutinize each other in terms of language, of accent, and of certain social cues:

* The Jewish family's inability to speak English seals their doom as they hide under the floorboards of the French farmer's house, unaware that Landa is openly discussing their demise. And by pulling out a Sherlock Holmes pipe and puffing on it as he prepares to reveal that he has known all along that the farmer is hiding the family, Landa is practically telegraphing this to the farmer - but it only makes sense after it's too late.

* British agent Lt. Hicox gives himself away as a spy first by his German accent (which, good as it may be, cannot fool an authentic German) and then by being unaware of the cultural custom of holding two fingers and a thumb up to signal the number three (rather than the more common method of simply using the main three fingers).

* At the Nazi film event, Landa can instantly detect the Basterds are spies by their poor Italian accents.

* And at the restaurant alone with Shosanna, Landa drops some shibboleth-hints to suggest he secretly knows who she really is, by making overt references to milk and cream as he grills her about her made-up identity.


I tend to speak in shibboleths anyway, through no conscious effort or conspiratorial agenda of my own. I often weave pop-culture references into things I say (but in a dry and ironic way, and not necessarily endorsing the sources of those references.) Example: speaking to a group of children at an art education event a few years back, I pronounced the word "authority" as "autho-ri-tahhh", a la South Park's Cartman. The kids immediately burst into laughter en masse, while the reference was lost on all the adults in the room, who looked around confusedly, wondering what had just happened.

I love those kind of moments, and that's why I sprinkle shibboleths around for my own amusement, and to enjoy bisecting a conversation into multiple invisible levels, each of which may have a different effect on a different listener. Sometimes my associate J.T. Dockery and I will have conversations that consist solely of quotes from old songs and movies that we both adore, which can be quite puzzling to an outsider.

1877 E. Howard Tower Clock

Last week I spotted this clockwork wonder in the lobby of the Henry County courthouse in Kentucky. It was the original courthouse tower clock, which had been abandoned when it ceased to work many years ago, but then some enterprising soul rescued it from whatever guano-encrusted shed in which it had been stored, and coaxed it like Frankenstein's Monster back into renewed life.



The clock was manufactured in 1877 by a Boston, Massachusetts company specifically for the Henry County courthouse's original incarnation. I was thrilled to discover such a Steampunky find out in the glory lands of rural Kentucky, but the locals seem jaded about it, and found it a source of considerable mirth that I was taking pictures of it like a foreign tourist.

Alek James Hidell

My good friend and Interzone bowling partner Lee Harvey Oswald was the subject of a song I demo'd for the Lexington, KY punk band Nine Pound Hammer way back in the day (1887, wasn't it?) but the song was never recorded. I ended up recording it myself with The Kentuckians for their debut CD on Creeps Records in 1999, where it was available in stores only briefly before lapsing into utter obscurity. Now it's back from the dead for the YouTube generation - click here to inwestigate, Comrade.